Cheat Codes
Before You start with this keep in mind You'll be changeing a file so make a backup copy before You begin. Now, this is the complete procedure:
1. Go to the game directory, subdir GameDataSetsClassic_01GameDataCommon.
2. Make a backup copy of Spreadsheets.mob.
3. Context-click the file, select Open With..., and pick WinZip or WinRAR (you probably ought to uncheck "Always use this program to open this file"). Or you can just rename mob files to zip files. In fact the game does care if you change the names of the .mob files to .zip...works just fine.
4. Extract the file racemodifiers.txt.
5. Context-click the file, select Properties, and uncheck the read only flag.
6. Open the file with Notepad.
7. Scroll down to the second table named RacePickPoints.
8. You will see a list of races followed by three columns.
9. The first two columns are species and race, don't change these values. The final number in each row is apparently the number of pick points you are granted initially. I changed the 0 for EVON to 1000, and when I finished this procedure, I started out with 1000 points instead of 0. I don't know if changing the value for Custom does anything.
10. After editing the values, save the file and change the read only flag back to true. I don't know if that matters though. make a Spreadsheets directory where Spreadsheets.mob is located, and put the text files in there!
Example: Backup the Spreadsheets.mob file so you can recover if you mess it up. Change the extension to .zip and open it w/winzip, winrar, or whatever you like to use to open zip files. It should open and you should see a large amount of .txt files. These are whitespace delimited "spreadsheets" that describe all the formulas and stats for the way the game works. Extract all the files, they should all be in a directory called Spreadsheets unless you opted to not keep path info on extraction. You'll need to fix that when re-zipping the thing so it's best to preserve this information. You'll need to change the properties to remove the read-only attribute for any file you want to modify. Anyway open up the racemodifiers.txt, search for RacePickPoints. This should take you to the appropriate table. Change the find the row of your choice, say Human, and change the 0 in the last column to 520. Save, set the read-only attribute, rezip the Spreadsheets directory, preserve full path,! and use none for the compression type. Move this back into the game directory from whence it came. I've not tested what happens if you have a .mob and a .zip of the same name...it may well prefer the .mob so make certain you only have one Spreadsheets.xxx of whatever .mob or .zip in the directory. Now run the game, choose human, and customize. You should see 520 in the lower right for points left. This is enough points to get all the maximums humans are allowed to get. In that same file you can change it so that Antaran background is allowable for humans; rather than grayed out. Just go back in and look for RaceSpecialAttributes (at the bottom of file) last column for human row shows an x by default. The x, apparently, means that that race, humans in this case, cannot have this ability. Change it to 10 and it'll charge you 10 points to get it. R, as you would see it the other tables seems to indicate that that ability is a racial given. So perhaps an R is also a possibility for that spot. In any event you can now see that this can dramatically change the game.
There is also a CheatCodes.txt file in that Spreadsheets.mob/zip but I don't know what you need to type to get those things to take effect.Hex Cheats
Some Useful Cheats
Open your savegame file using any hex editor. Search the file for your empire name string. Add 27 to that offset and you'll have offset of your money amount. Just change the 4 bytes as you wish. For example: 00 0f 42 40 = 1.000.000 money.
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